Palo Alto Networks: Twitter Usage Soars in the Enterprise

Written by Alex Williams / November 10, 2009 11:57 PM / 4 Comments

The news from Palo Alto Networks reinforces what we should probably expect will be the norm for the foreseeable future. According to the company's Application Usage and Risk Report, social technologies and collaborative applications are moving deep into the enterprise with Twitter seeing a 250 percent increase in use since Spring of last year.

In face of a report like this, it makes sense that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would be a fit for companies. Employees understand how social technologies function. Collaborative applications make sense for getting the work done.

Here are some more results from the Palo Alto study:

Sharepoint adoption increased 48 percent compared to last year.
Google Docs showed up in 82% of the organizations, compared to 33% a year ago. Bandwidth increased 290 percent since spring of this year.
Facebook increased 59 percent when measured by the frequency in which it was detected on corporate networks. Organizations saw big bumps in bandwidth consumption, increasing 294 percent to 6.3 gigabytes per organization.

The study comes in the wake of a number of announcements, most notably from Cisco, which seems to have an understanding of the social network dynamics at play in the enterprise. At a press conference on Monday, John Chambers outlined a number of initiatives.

Notable were his insights into how collaboration is the best way to quickly invent new products and enter new markets. He said this is especially true with younger workers entering the workforce. Young people are familiar with social networking and increasingly see it is the best way to foster collaboration.

Comments

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IT culture in the east coast is way different in the west coast. I wonder if this takes that into account. For example, on the east coast most enterprises use .NET, in the west coast it is more Java. I would expect social networking in the enterprises is adopted more in the west coast.

Posted by: matthewcp | November 11, 2009 8:29 AM

Making">http://www.jenesysgroup.com/making-twitter-work-for-you-2">Making twitter work is a debated topic especially in enterprises. I do feel most dont even know if its working or not.

Posted by: Jenesys | November 11, 2009 9:35 AM

I can not understand, why enterprises use Twitter instead of "serious" Enterprise Microblogging-Tools such as Yammer oder Communote (http://www.communote.com/homepage/en/).

Any suggestions?

Posted by: Joerg Hoewner | November 13, 2009 2:05 AM

We consult to senior executives in the small and medium, private business sector and see exactly the same trend occurring. However, adoption rate seems to be both faster and slower - more extremes. They either make a quick decision to get on board and build a social media strategy or they don't have any extra resources to deploy and also don't understand its applicability well enough to engage. They can't afford to make mistakes like larger organizations can at this juncture. Thanks for sharing.

Blaine Millet
www.someexec.com

Posted by: Blaine Millet | November 17, 2009 7:35 AM